OLD HACK.(The Talk of the Town)(how a former taxi driver obtained a book contract)

Robert Miller, who is the president of Hyperion Books, had to get to a meeting, so he waved at a cab on Columbus Avenue. "The cab stopped," Miller said later. "It really just stopped for a red light, but I thought maybe it had stopped for me. I don't know why I thought that, because if you looked at it you realized it was not a current cab." Indeed, the cab was a Checker, a transportation species that became officially extinct in New York in 1999, when its last medallion-bearing representative went out of service.

The one that stopped for Miller belonged to Bobby Lowich, who retired from cab driving in 1997, primarily so that he could spend his time doing the thing he loves most, which is driving a cab. Lowich explained to Miller that he and his car were no longer in business but that they didn't have anything pressing to do, so, "sure, what the hell, get in, I'll take you." On their way downtown, Lowich did most of the talking--another continuity between his pre- and post-retirement existences. He told Miller that the city's first gasoline-powered taxis were introduced in 1907, and that fifty of them lined up that year at the grand opening of the Plaza Hotel, where, as a promotion, they gave free rides to celebrities. He said that the idea of distinguishing taxis from regular cars by painting the taxis yellow was popularized by a Chicago car dealer named John D. Hertz, who founded the Yellow Cab Company, in 1915. Hertz franchised his idea, and he used the same color scheme for the logo of a car-rental company he founded in 1924. Lowich said a lot of other things, too. By the time Miller got to his meeting, the experience had become "very 'Brigadoon'-like," he recalled.

Lowich, who is sixty-seven years old and looks a little like Ed Asner, drives about a hundred miles a day, mostly in Manhattan. He doesn't pick up fares, but he sometimes gives rides to friends. His car is easy to spot, not only because it's one of the last functioning Checkers anywhere (the Checker Cab Manufacturing Company stopped producing them in 1983) but also because it's painted green and cream--which are popular taxi colors in, of all places, John D. Hertz's home town, where Lowich's cab originated.

"Taxis used to come with a door missing in front, on the side ...